Transcript
Mike Matchett: Hi Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data and we are here talking with Nexsan about their latest and greatest release, which extends their product line to some interesting edges. And we'll get to that in a second. But first I just want to say it's becoming more of a cyber secure storage world. And they have some things to tell us about that as well. So just hold on and we'll get right into it. Hey. Welcome, Vincent. Welcome to our show. Vincent Phillips, CEO: Hey, Mike. Thanks for having me. Mike Matchett: All right. Before we before we dive into Nexsan, uh, let's let's just review a little bit about, you know, where your background is. What got you. What got you excited about storage? Uh, and and you know what you're looking at. What do you see in the industry here going on right now? Vincent Phillips, CEO: Well, my background, uh, started in the software space, so, you know, more of a software engineer, but the storage space is interesting because it's, you know, data. You've heard it said a million times. Data is the new oil and you got to put data somewhere. And guess what goes on storage. Next thing is all about storage. And so that's where we play. And that's what makes me excited about about this company. Mike Matchett: Yeah. So where did next. It's been around for a while. Where did you guys start and what have you been doing over all that time? Vincent Phillips, CEO: We started about 26 years ago. We've always been about putting the customer first, about building reliable products. Um, customizable products. Uh, so that's what we've been about. Been around, you know, as I said, for quite some time. But always we think, uh, keeping the customer first. Mike Matchett: Yeah. For that, that amount of time, you really have learned what people need out of storage, what they really look for, what they demand, what has to be there, uh, and to maintain a reputation for that long of time is really quite something. Uh, so, uh, it looks exactly. Vincent Phillips, CEO: We do we do pride ourselves on our longevity. Uh, and, you know, the support that we provide for our systems is, uh, is, you know, we don't think we're second to anybody. Mike Matchett: All right. Obviously, uh, you know, right now, let me just jump into some trends. We're seeing a couple of things going on in the industry. Uh, big things like, uh, everyone wants more, uh, AI storage, which means they need more data, more available in more places than they ever have before. So they can't just put things out on tape and send them to the desert. They've got to have things online. Uh, we're seeing, uh, I mentioned cybersecurity. We're talking about a storage that has to really start to implement some of the features that in the past, we might have relied upon our firewalls to do for us or other layered tools, but now we've got to start baking them into the storage itself. So, uh, do those resonate with you? Is that what you see your customers asking for, or is there is there something else we should also be aware of? Vincent Phillips, CEO: Oh, yeah. No. You know, starts with backup, obviously, and the ability to, uh, make your backups immutable so they can't be changed. Uh, but beyond that, um, you know, customers want to know that at the file level, uh, you know, they have that kind of protection. That data cannot be altered even by our own internal people who have permission, you know. So we have solutions that really are second to none in terms of their ability to protect you from ransomware and more importantly, recover from that ransomware. You mentioned AI. Ai is driving a big data boom. Uh, data that you never thought would be interesting to a large language model is now interesting. Your own customer service data, for example. So being able to expose those data sets, more and more data sets you didn't necessarily expose in the past, you want to be able to expose those data sets in a high performant way to, uh, some of these large language models. So we're seeing customers make use of our products for that to bring data, uh, off of tape, off of old archives and make them more readable and available, uh, to some of these new applications. Mike Matchett: All right. You know, next is well known for being able to do large, vast amounts of block storage, high performance type type. You know, the next kind of sand, right? It's like, how do I how do I take 50PB of, of block storage and get that into my data center, into my environment? Um, but that's, that's evolving a little bit. You mentioned immutability is something that has to be there. You've got another, uh, big solution for immutable. Immutable is what's it called? Surian. Right. Vincent Phillips, CEO: Yeah. The Shiran platform. Exactly. Yeah. Mike Matchett: And and now we're talking, uh, really about sort of this modern idea of storage being unified where we've got, uh, support for different kinds of protocols, file and object and so on. And being like you mentioned, being able to take some of the things we want to do for storage and bring it really down to a file or object level. So that fine grained level of management, um, do you see, do you see people thinking of storage now? More a little bit less about the place where we dump data and a little bit more about where we, uh, curate our, our value, where we curate the data that we're trying to use. Vincent Phillips, CEO: I think that's well, well, that's a good word to describe it. You know, once upon a time you just pour the data in the lake and, you know, maybe someone uses it or they don't. We don't know. Um, but we still do. Still, uh, you know, that high density block storage for those use cases. But, yeah, now there's more interest in being able to, as you say, curate the data, be able to get at it at a, at a file level, at a block level, being able to hybridize on prem, you know, with what, what assets you might have in the cloud and be able to sync across cloud and your on prem, on your, in your on prem data is also a key thing. And again, you know our platforms can deliver on that kind of a solution. Mike Matchett: I was going to drill into immutability. But first let's talk about this hybrid idea. You just you just sort of opened up because I think that's really relevant to everyone. You know, we've got we've got now a decade or more of history pushing us to migrate stuff and transition to a cloud. But now we're seeing also that people are saying, you know, if I put everything in the cloud, I can't do X, Y, and Z with it. I can't get it to the edge of my business anymore. It's it's out of my hands. It starts to also get expensive for some places. How does Nexsan fit into this idea of building a hybrid cloud environment? Vincent Phillips, CEO: Well, one of the recent releases of our of our OS for our unity platform has what we call the cloud connector. And this allows you to synchronize data bidirectionally on prem to the cloud, Amazon, Azure, etc.. And what that does is let you know make it if you if you want to use the cloud, cool. You know, go ahead. Uh, as you said, it's not always cost effective for large data sets. It's also not performant necessarily for, you know, departments that are not in the, you know, close to the data center. So our hybrid solution lets you, uh, put an edge server closer to your user and your data is now on prem, but also can synchronize Bidirectionally with your cloud, if that's what you if that's what you want to do. Um, so it's really about flexibility making it easier for that IT guy to to manage his data. Mike Matchett: I knew with with synchronization of data. I mean you were talking large scales to here not just simply a file. Uh, you can you know, you can enable an organization to say, hey, we have to stand up, for example, an AI center of excellence. Should we do it in the cloud? Should we do it in that cloud? Should we do it on prem? Should we do it in a partner facility? But this enables them to, uh, have that agility to, to do whichever one they choose. Vincent Phillips, CEO: Right, exactly. And you know, there when it comes to AI, these these consume massive amounts of compute. And so you you want to look at that profile. And perhaps the data needs to be close to the compute platform. And so that's a that's a place where Nexsan can really help, um, bring the data down from the cloud or cache it off of the cloud into your, into a unity, uh, system. And now your AI Lem, you know, has, uh, close access to that data and can actually get get its work done in a reasonable amount of time. Mike Matchett: And we don't really know what's coming with AI. Three months from now, much less six months from now, a year from now, I think really I keep saying this is agility, but what I really mean is that workload is changing rapidly. You know, we had we had the idea that you had to have these huge pools of data to do all your your inference and training. Uh, and then we had this idea like, well, that's done once on the big model, now you're doing sort of limited models and then that's gone away. Now we're doing rag kind of stuff, which is running in real time. Our operational time. Right. That's not done on the back end. That's done at access time. Uh, so you you need different kind of storage for that as well. Uh, and who knows, six months from now we're going to be talking, I think, more about edge cases and things like that. Um, so let me, let me which I think brings up things of where we're at. So your product line generally over time are aiming at these large, I call them beasts, but these large multi-petabyte kinds of deployments. But you're starting to find that there's demand for storage in smaller chunks. What's going on there? What's what? How's that demand coming? Vincent Phillips, CEO: Yeah. So, you know, we have we can go as small as five terabytes, for example. But what we see is that, again, the IT leader wants to have enterprise features for, for that storage. And so we we provide the whole set of enterprise level features across the entire product line, whether it's 5TB or 20PB, whatever makes sense for that particular organization. And then being able to scale it up. Right. So, you know, we've mentioned, uh, you know, these edge cases where you might have a department that's away from, you know, the data center somewhere. Um, and that makes sense for them to have a enterprise level, uh, storage facility with enterprise features that can be audited, that can that has immutability, that can be safe from ransomware attacks, can be recovered from ransomware, attack all those features and functions that are you would normally expect from your enterprise level data center storage. You want that in in in the smaller enterprises. So we're seeing, you know, all those different kinds of customers come to the fore. Mike Matchett: Right. And that's the that's this, that's this unity envy 4000. Yeah. Vincent Phillips, CEO: Unity envy 4000, uh, is, you know, the the entry level, if you will, that, you know, can be as small as five terabytes. Okay. Um, and then all the way up to our envy, 10,000 can go 20, 20PB. Mike Matchett: I don't I don't mean for you to laundry list these necessarily, Vincent, because we're having a discussion here, but I think it's fascinating when you say enterprise features at, at in that small entry level, it's probably not even the right way to say it in the smaller form factor that we can pyramid out to wherever we need to, uh, on that way, but just just touch on some of the highlights of enterprise features that you might not find in other small, uh, arrays or small five terabyte devices. Vincent Phillips, CEO: So MV 4000 all the way up to the envy 10,000 immutable snapshots Got S3 object locking, encryption at rest and in transit. You can do that in software or if you want to use secure, you know, secure drives, which are a little more costly. Uh, but, you know, you can either do it in software or hardware. Frontier fast tier caching, um, inline compression, replication, data integrity, high availability. All all of our env set systems, uh, dual controllers, active. Active. Uh, so they're high availability. You can upgrade them. Nondestructively. They all work with the Asurion software for, uh, ransomware protection, um, for higher grade ransomware protection. This cloud connector, the ability to sync from both directions that's available on every platform. The SMB, um, audit function where from an SMB perspective, you can audit every single file used by every single user. So your single pane of glass, whatever you're using to manage your data center Enter SMB access to that audit feature. So all those features, we call those the enterprise level features. They're available for men V 4000, 6000 or 10,000. All three of them. Mike Matchett: And and it's this isn't a cafeteria style pricing right. This is all in you get you get this when you buy the box. Vincent Phillips, CEO: Yeah. You all the features are always there for every box. You don't. There's no upcharges for this feature. And that feature, you know that when you we put an NV 4000 over in that particular department, but you want the 6000 for somebody else, you're going to manage them all exactly the same way. Mike Matchett: All right. Tell me a little bit about then what. When people look at this and they say, oh, now I can do x, y and Z with the use cases. Really? What what are some of the most popular things people say? Oh, this really enables me now to do this. Vincent Phillips, CEO: Well, we already talked about the backup, so I won't I won't say a ton about that. Um, we've seen in the media environment, uh, broadcasters, large broadcasters Casters using it as media storage. Um, the digital video surveillance is a growing area where we're seeing customers want, uh, this kind of storage. So, uh, primary and secondary hypervisor storage. Always been a key player there. Um, so in addition to backup and recovery, it's media. Uh, it's digital video surveillance, uh, and, and primary and secondary hypervisor storage. Those are, those are some of the key use cases that we see. Mike Matchett: And I think, you know, when you talk about eye to eye is multimodal nowadays. Right. So that's that's video AI to now it's not simply. So that's also that's also converging across there. I like that. Vincent Phillips, CEO: Exactly. And also in the media and entertainment space AI plays a big role there too. Mike Matchett: All right. So this looks like this looks like you're getting ready really to help someone start to do what I've always thought should happen with cloud services. And that's really arbitrage and architect and build something hybrid and have that effective ability to react to changes in the market, changes into services offered, changes, competitiveness, changes in pricing structures, and we take advantage of that by being able to do use things like Cloud Connect and, well, let's just synchronize the data here now and become a more agile organization. Vincent Phillips, CEO: So exactly, I mean, we would love it if every, you know, every byte is stored on an X box. But we recognize, hey, cloud. Cloud has a role to play. Makes it easy for for this or that or whatever, you know, pick your use case. Uh, but what this lets you do is move back and forth. The, you know, cloud connector in particular. You know, at one point I want to have, uh, data stored in the cloud, this particular use case, and later maybe it evolves and I need to have closer to my user. Well, we're going to support that. And so, you know, you don't put all your data on Nexsan. Fine. We'll support you. Uh, again love to have it all there. Well, we recognize that, uh, that's not always the case. And you mentioned sort of pricing changes, right? There's always going to be evolution, uh, around the cloud providers as it is, you know, for us on the hardware providers. Um, and so you want to be able to take advantage six months, nine months when when pricing changes. Let's let's be able to move my data where it makes sense for me to move my data. Mike Matchett: Awesome. Awesome. Uh, so I just sort of one sort of last wrapping up question here. Vincent, it's like we picked on a lot of different topics, right? We touched on a lot of different things. I think people have got sort of the main ideas of this, but if someone wants to learn more about Nexsan, obviously you've got a website. Is there specific things that you'd say here, start here, do this, uh, take this learning path. Vincent Phillips, CEO: Well, I'd like to start with the sale, so I'll go with Sales@Nexsan.com . But, you know, Nexsan.com is a good place to start. A lot of data sheets use cases published there. You know, you can find use cases you're looking for and drill down and find the right solution. But, you know, just shoot an email to Sales@Nexsan.com if you just want us to contact you. Mike Matchett: I'm sure I'm sure they will, folks. Take Uh. All right. This has been great. Uh, just, uh, so kind of last words, if you want. Where is this going? What are we looking forward to next in cyber secure storage or. Or this sort of, uh, type of, uh, bulk? We keep everything, keep it active. Uh, keep it, keep it working for us. Hybrid storage world. Where do we go next? Vincent Phillips, CEO: I think it is about active. Right. Having your data accessible at all times and fully protected. Knowing. Going to sleep at night. Knowing that if something bad happens, I'll be able to get back, back to business in no time at all. And that's what we're all about. Mike Matchett: That's great. Thank you very much, Vincent, for being here today. Vincent Phillips, CEO: Thank you. Mike Matchett: Thank you guys for watching. That's Nexsan.com . I think I got that right. Sales@Nexsan.com is it? Vincent Phillips, CEO: Perfect. Mike Matchett: Take care folks and see you next time.
